Ontario Obsession: How Wynne’s Wind Power Cult Wrecked Once Prosperous Province

Those places with the highest power prices in the world (Ontario, Denmark, Germany and South Australia) have a few things in common: an obsession with wind and/or solar and zealots in charge, hellbent on driving that obsession.

Over the last decade, Ontario has been overrun with these things: driving power prices through the roof; driving neighbours nuts and out of their homes, altogether; and wrecking underground water supplies.

From Kathleen Wynne down, Ontario’s government has done everything in its power to destroy once peaceful and very prosperous rural communities.

Here’s a primer on how the disaster started.

GOLDSTEIN: Green energy is Grits’ mega-blunder
Toronto Sun
Lorrie Goldstein
25 March 2018

When it comes to the countless blunders Ontario’s Liberal government has committed on the energy file, its passage of the Green Energy and Green Economy Act in 2009 was its worst blunder of all.

It facilitated the waste of billions of dollars of public money, as documented by two Ontario auditors general.

It denied natural justice to the citizens of rural Ontario, by dictatorially usurping the planning powers of their municipal governments with regard to the location of industrial wind factories and solar farms.

That turned neighbour against neighbour, as green energy developers quietly signed deals to lease privately-owned lands in rural Ontario for wind factories and solar farms, with the projects then presented to the surrounding community as a fait accompli, in which they had no meaningful say.

The fault was not with people who legally leased their lands to these developers.

It lies with the Liberal government, first under Dalton McGuinty and now Kathleen Wynne, who abdicated the proper role of government, which is to balance public and private interests.

Instead, the Liberals became shameless cheerleaders, advocates and allies of the green energy industry, to the point where citizens opposed to these projects faced the impossible task of fighting the industry and the Liberal government at the same time.

In 2011, when then-Auditor General Jim McCarter first investigated the Liberals’ green energy strategy, he reported his department had to start from scratch because the Liberals, incredibly, “had not recently conducted any audit work on renewable energy initiatives.”

Citing the Green Energy Act, McCarter warned the Liberals had “created a new process to expedite the development of renewable energy by providing the Minister (of Energy) with the authority to supersede many of the government’s usual planning and regulatory oversight processes … As a result, no comprehensive business-case evaluation was done to objectively evaluate the impacts of the billion-dollar commitment.”

McCarter said the Liberals even ignored the advice of their own energy experts in deciding to pay inflated, 20-year public subsidies to wind and solar developers through their “Feed-in Tariff” (FIT) program.

Had they heeded that advice, McCarter said, the Liberals could have saved the public $4.4 billion over two decades.

When Bonnie Lysyk, McCarter’s successor, revisited the issue in 2015, she concluded the Liberals, and thus the public, will overpay $9.2 billion over 20 years for wind and solar power, at rates twice the U.S. average for wind and 3.5 times for solar.

In addition to grossly overpaying for unreliable wind and solar power — which provides less than 7% of Ontario’s power needs and cannot provide base load power to the grid — the Liberals gave it priority over all other forms of energy, meaning it must be paid for first, even when it can’t be used, because Ontario has a huge energy surplus.

This makes the electricity system less efficient and more expensive, resulting in the dumping of other forms of green energy, such as hydro power, or selling it at a loss to Quebec and the U.S.

While the Liberals reluctantly admitted their blunder two years ago by finally ending provincial funding of green energy mega-projects they are still, inexplicably, bringing hundreds of smaller projects online, buying more expensive and unreliable electricity that we don’t need.

Finally wind and solar power weren’t needed to end Ontario’s reliance on coal-fired electricity, as the Liberals claim, which they actually did with nuclear power and natural gas.
Toronto Sun